“Poppy’s Best Day Ever” – The Post

June normally means Summer camps, 100+ degree weather and the beginning of personal pieces in preparation to SCBWI’s Los Angeles Conference. This year it meant: “Poppy’s Best Day Ever” – A Picture-book in 30 Days Challenge. From signed contract to delivered artwork in 1 month (DVD coming soon).

And I know what you are thinking: Why did you do THAT? Two reasons: 1) story was about birds and 2) it was for El Mejor Nido ®. What a great opportunity! Still, why did you do that? Well, at the beginning the project was for 6 illustrations so it sounded doable. OK, then. Did you make the deadline? Yep. Was it difficult? Yep. Would you do it again? NO. And I warn you, don’t even try to convince me to take a deadline like that again. I will hurt you!
So I survived that June of bad meals, long hours and endless cursing to the lack of clones available for purchase. Now I got my copies in hand and get to blog about it. So get comfy and here we go!

The book is about a little bird, her birthday and her birthday wish. It is printed in both English and Spanish. Copies are handed for free during El Mejor Nido ® events in California, Texas, New York and Florida.

Now a little bit of how I work. First I sketch my characters and then move on to a color version of at least my main character. This is the first Poppy I painted for the book. Later the beak got longer and curved upwards. A good improvement.

I normally sketch to size on paper and take care of revisions on tracing paper. I scan the revisions and add to the initial sketch in Photoshop. Some spreads are sketched and done with no revisions. Others take many, many revisions. A matter of tweaking as needed and requested.

When I’m working, I like hanging the character studies and sketch I’m working on right in front of me. A good reminder of were I need to get. As I’m done with each illustration, I hang them and look at them over and over again – for reference and looking for changes. I always have changes. With this book, the time was really limited per illustration but I still made changes until it was time to ship them.